3 ways to avoid the great printer ink rip-off

Cartridge inkjet printers dominate the market and their ink usage can be ludicrously expensive – for some models, you’d pay more for replacement ink in just three months than you did for the printer itself. 

We’ve found 52 printers currently on the market where you’d spend more than £100 a year on ink alone, based on our expert tests, with some costing a whopping £500 or more per year.

Our tests reveal that the most expensive cartridge printer costs £152 to buy, plus a ridiculous £756.48 for a single year’s replacement ink. If you bought a tank printer instead, it would cost peanuts.

For one fully-featured tank model we recommend (£350), the cost of ink for one year is only £1.92 – clearly the best way to avoid the great printer ink rip-off, and you’d save a fortune in the long run. You can get cheaper tank printers too – they start from around £150.

But even if you don’t want to switch printer, there are plenty of ways to save hundreds of pounds on printer ink. Below, we reveal the three key ways to save, plus the most popular tank printers on Which.co.uk.

Best home printers – we’ve tested more than 150 printers currently on the market at our professional lab, so you know which are the best on the market – and the cheapest to run.

3 ways you can save on printer ink

Our expert lab tests not only find printers that print brilliantly, but – crucially – how much they cost to run. Three quarters of Which? members (73%) still own a cartridge inkjet printer, according to our latest survey. 

Our running cost calculations are for a typical user printing 20 black text pages and 10 office graphics pages a month – hardly heavy usage.

Here’s three ways to avoid the trap of original ink cartridges:

1. Switch to third-party ink (no need to buy a new printer), which are cheaper than original-brand ink cartridges
2. Buy a tank printer (saves you more in the long run)
3. Use an ink subscription service (if you manage it carefully).

Third-party ink is available for most printers. However, some, particularly those from HP, block the use of third-party ink. 

Will third-party ink work in your printer?

To find out if third-party ink will work in your printer, head to an online retailer such as Stinkyink or Refresh and input your model of printer.

The providers will then show what ink they have available that will work in your printer. If the only ink available is the same brand as your printer, then it’s likely your printer is locked to first-party ink only (although try a few other third-party providers – such as Ink Factory and Inkredible – just to be sure).

HP printers that have ‘dynamic security’ or the HP Plus service installed are unfortunately locked into HP ink. The only option you have here is to see if the HP Instant Ink subscription service would save you money.

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What’s cheaper: switching to third-party ink or buying a tank printer?

Tank printers are inkjets, just like traditional cartridge models. The only difference is that the ink is stored in large tanks rather than cartridges.

You can easily spot a tank printer. Look for the ink ‘windows’ on the front, which allow you to easily see how much ink is left.

If you have a cartridge printer that you don’t want to replace yet, you can still save hundreds of pounds by switching to third-party ink. These are sold online by long-established providers such as Refresh and Inkredible.

How you can save with third-party ink

According to our annual survey of owners, a typical printer lasts for 13 years and a typical user buys two sets of replacement cartridges a year.

• With original ink, over the printer’s lifespan we calculate this would cost £1,631.24 on average.
• If you switched to compatible third-party cartridges, this would cost you £613.34 – a massive £1,017.90 saving.
• If you bought a typical tank printer (£288 on average) and used original ink, this would cost only £32.11 over 13 years, and bottled ink for tank printers is far cheaper, even if you stick with the manufacturer’s ink. This would cost you £320 over 13 years – a saving of £1,311.24. This is even more than sticking with your cartridge printer and switching to third-party ink cartridges.
• While environmentally you might not want to change your printer prematurely, replacement ink bottles have a much lower environmental footprint than replacement cartridges, as you need to replace tank printer ink much less frequently.

Best cheap ink cartridges – our expert tests reveal the best ways to save a small fortune on ink, whatever printer you use.

Third-party ink vs printer manufacturer ink

Here are some typical comparisons on what you could save by switching to third-party ink, depending on the type of inkjet printer you have:

Traditional cartridge inkjet printer

Prices for example printer Canon Pixma TS6350 (£102):

• £86.49 (£1.85 per ml) – Best-value original ink cartridge set 
• £20.75 (34p per ml) – Third-party ink set (from third-party supplier Inkredible)

Ink tank printer

Prices for example printer Canon Pixma G1530 (£140):

• £41.26 (12p per ml) – Best-value original ink bottle set 
• £19.90 (6p per ml) – Same-size third-party ink set (from supplier Cartridge People) 

As you can see, the owner of the Canon cartridge printer would save more than three quarters of the cost of ink by switching to third-party ink. The tank printer buyer would save just over half by switching to third-party ink.

That said, tank printer ink is vastly cheaper per ml even compared to third-party cartridge ink, so the saving for tank printer owners in switching to third-party ink is much lower, as a single replacement set of ink bottles for a tank printer holds so much ink, it’ll probably last you for years.

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Ink subscription services: are they worth it?

All the major inkjet printer manufacturers offer ink subscription services, which allow you to get ink (or toner for laser printers) regularly delivered to your door on demand.

These are the cheapest services they offer: 

• HP Instant Ink from £1.49 for just 10 pages a month
• Epson ReadyPrint from 99p a month for just 10 pages

You pay per page rather than for the ink you use, so this service is cheaper for those who print lots of photos – printing a single line of black text costs just the same.

To save money compared to buying original ink cartridges yourself, you need to maximise the use of your allowance each month and not go over it, or you'll incur high additional charges.

While some pages roll over to the next month, there is quite a low cap on how much you can do this before you start wasting your allowance. That means you need to manage your subscription carefully, and it will only work well if you print a fairly consistent number of pages each month – or you're willing to pay for the convenience of having ink delivered direct to your door automatically whenever you’re running low.

Find out more from the manufacturer websites:

• HP printers: HP Instant Ink
• Canon printers: Ink subscriptions (multiple options)
• Brother printers: Brother EcoPro
• Epson printers: Epson ReadyPrint

Tank printers: how much can you save?

Tank printers hold so much ink that 53% of owners in our survey say they have never needed to replace it, while 23% have only replaced the ink once (and another 11% twice) over the lifetime of their printer so far.

We’ve calculated the costs for the average ink tank model and cartridge inkjet model over the printer’s 13-year lifetime, both for the upfront cost of the printer and the ink running costs. We’ve done this for a regular user (RU) printing 20 black text pages and 10 pages including graphics a month, and for a very infrequent user (VIU) printing the same amount of pages but over a six-month period, using original ink.

Even if you don’t use your cartridge inkjet that often, it’s still more than £100 more expensive over the lifetime of the printer (13 years on average) than a typical ink tank model.

Cartridge inkjet users can save a huge amount by switching to third-party ink, so this could be the cheaper route for some infrequent printer users.

Tank printer owners won’t save that much more by switching to third-party ink most of the time. A typical user will only spend £32.11 on ink over the 13-year lifetime of your printer anyway, using original ink – that’s probably only one replacement set of bottles of ink needed over your tank printer’s entire lifetime.

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3 most popular tank printers on Which.co.uk

These are the three most popular tank printer reviews read on Which.co.uk over the past year. Which? members can find out if these are good models to choose and what you should watch out for by using the links to our reviews.

Canon Pixma G3570

Canon was one of the pioneers to develop the tank printer and this is one of its cheaper models. Ink cartridge models can be super-cheap upfront, but not necessarily the better investment in the long run.

This is quite a basic model, but it does offer wireless printing, so you can print directly from your computer, smartphone or tablet. It also supports AirPrint for the easiest printing from Apple devices.

Could this be the perfect choice for your next printer? Our experts reveal all the need-to-knows in our Canon Pixma G3570 review.

Epson Ecotank ET-8500

This high-end tank printer from Epson is aimed at anyone looking for professional-quality results from desktop publishing – for example, printing leaflets or photos on glossy photo paper.

Instead of the usual four ink reservoirs in a typical tank printer (black and three colours), this model has six. This includes grey and photo black, to produce the most accurate colour reproduction for professional users.

It’s certainly not cheap, but do the results make it worth it? Find out in our comprehensive Epson Ecotank ET-8500 review.

Canon Maxify GX6050

This higher-end all-in-one printer has a scanner and even offers an auto document feeder – a lifesaver if you want to scan a long, multipage document.

It has the usual four ink tanks and a large paper capacity – 100 sheets, plus 250 sheets in the secondary tray. It has the usual wireless printing options, including Apple AirPrint from Apple devices, an ethernet socket for a wired internet connect, plus you can print from a USB stick.

There’s even a small colour screen, so you can preview your content prior to printing, saving you money on printing mistakes.

So is it worth the price? Our extensive tests leave no stone unturned – see if this is the perfect way to save in the long run in our Canon Maxify GX6050 review.